Give babies time, not targets

By Miriam Stoppard

12:01AM GMT 10 Nov 2005

I don't know which is the worst aspect of the Government's latest attempt to wind its tentacles round every aspect of our lives in the form of its national curriculum for babies - the interference of a nanny state or the interference of plain nannying - the idea that adults, in this case Whitehall mandarins, know best.

A baby needs neither. I would go further: a baby will fail to thrive with the oppressive intervention of either.

Echoes of Nineteen Eighty-Four refuse to go away. In that Orwell state the philosophy of the authorities was get 'em young and shape 'em as we will. That draconian approach was always repellent and it still is.

But my revulsion goes a lot deeper. The word "curriculum" offends me when applied to babies as though a standardised blueprint for their early development can hold any legitimacy. The word "curriculum" implies inclusions and exclusions.

The canvas of a baby's development is so broad, so all-encompassing, so unique unto itself that no general road map can accommodate the vagaries, the stops and starts, the growth spurts, that pepper a child's development. Nor can we hope to anticipate exactly how a baby's brain will soak up experience and learn.

A baby learns piecemeal. It doesn't know about planned learning. In order to accommodate the plethora of incoming signals - be they physical, intellectual, social, emotional or psychological - a baby's brain sprouts half a million connections a second (to other parts of the brain) in the first year and only marginally less up to its third year. That's why a baby's brain triples in weight in the first year.

So a baby's brain is wired to grow and mature, mastering the most difficult skills it will ever have to acquire, in the form of walking and speaking, in an unstructured way.

Ah, but I hear you say, how much more efficiently would babies acquire those skills if they were acquired in a structured way, in a controlled environment in the manner that Whitehall would impose on our nurseries and childminders. That school of thought also subscribes to the tenet that if something does you good, more must be better. It's a dangerous path to go down. If some things do you good, for example vitamins A and D, more of them may poison you rather than make you healthier. More structure to early learning could stunt rather than foster.

More than that, it seems to me, this proposed legislation smacks of something that I find extremely demoralising: a lack of trust. The Government emanates a belief that sensible, intelligent, caring people won't take their job seriously unless they are policed. Every man-manager knows that that is the last way to encourage diligence and commitment. I have seen many nurseries in my time and on the whole a more dedicated, responsible profession would be hard to find.

Every baby does have a developmental blueprint, of course, but it is unique to itself and will only emerge in an informal, deconstructed environment where it has free rein. The skills that the curriculum outlines - head control, binocular vision, gurgling and attempts at communication in the first eight months; sitting, standing and cruising in the next 10 - are all milestones most babies will achieve but they need the freedom to acquire them at their own pace, in their own way. To my mind a curriculum would be a straitjacket for most babies and set them up for failure at an appallingly early age. A curriculum isn't the best vehicle to help babies achieve their milestones happily, triumphantly, and in the best of all worlds, unconsciously.

As with much legislation that's lost touch with reality, the national curriculum plan for babies has taken flight into the realms of silliness with the appointment of inspectors who will test babies to see if they are "able to express joy, sadness, frustration and fear..."

I wonder what kind of exams these inspectors will inflict on our babies to test for these reactions. I would have thought the inspectors would elicit much sadness, frustration and fear but precious little joy. As with much else, these lessons are best learnt in the friendly parental environment of home. That's also the place where they are best tested for. Most parents would invite the inspectors to come around and supervise bath times, where they will see the expression of all four emotions in Technicolor.

Every baby skill, be it manual dexterity, word recognition or running and jumping, happens when the appropriate brain/muscle connections are in place. They grow infinitesimally slowly, but for each child there is a window of opportunity when brain and musculature are poised to surge forward towards the acquisition of a particular skill. If that skill is encouraged when it's on the point of flowering, when it's at its optimum vivacity, it's acquired in a trice. If it's forced too early a child is miserable and unhappy. If the period of vivacity is missed, the skill is still acquired but never to the same potential as it might have been.

That's why a child who is ready to master bowel and bladder control needs no "training" and one who isn't ready can't be trained. And why a child introduced to a violin at five or six years old will play much better than if their first lesson was at, say, 15.

Now, if we are thinking primarily of our children's welfare, it's clear that being marshalled into a national curriculum does them a disservice at a very basic level. Whitehall lives by a strange construct that rules, regulations, guidelines and checks in and of themselves achieve educational goals, raise standards and help our children to reach their full potential.

They are only window dressing. The baby must determine its own curriculum, for a baby can't be taught in the traditional sense. This approach falls foul of the belief that children are little adults. They very much aren't and it's wholly wrong to apply yardsticks fashioned in the adult mould.